neverland
All is well, hastily scrawled onto a slip of paper that vaguely smells of salt in Kaldur's longhand, and even on good days, that's the most Nightwing can hope for. He burns it immediately but still sees the letters every time he blinks.
"They're fine," he tells Wally over the phone.
Wally hangs up on him before he's even finished his sentence.
.
Tim lands hard on his back, reeling from Cassie's hit, and all the wind is knocked out of him. Le'gaan starts to step forward but Nightwing puts an arm out to stop him, his eyes narrowing beneath his mask as he wills the boy to get up, kid, come on.
He stays on the ground, struggling to catch his breath, the sharp wheezes echoing in the training room, bouncing off the metal walls. Le'gaan glances at Nightwing.
"Just breathe, Robin," Nightwing tells him. "Take a breath."
His hands fly up to his chest, rubbing. Cassie looks on, worried.
"Nightwing?" she says, her voice higher than usual.
Le'gaan pushes Nightwing's arm away and hurries to Tim's side, pulling him up by the scruff of his neck and slapping him hard across the face. Only then does the wheezing turn into one, long inhale, and then he's breathing in shallow breaths. Cassie rushes to his other side.
"He's fine," Nightwing says.
"Yeah," Le'gaan snaps. "No thanks to you."
.
All is well. Nightwing brings the paper to his face and takes a deep breath. He doesn't know what he hopes to find.
He burns it and calls Wally but it goes straight to voicemail.
"Wally West's phone, do your thing at the beep."
He doesn't leave a message.
.
Zatanna sits on the edge of his bed and slips out of her boots, tossing them aside and sliding under the covers.
"It's funny how you think I came all this way to sleep alone," she says, patting the space next to her.
He looks down at the screen, all the material he has to sort through, detail he has to read, briefings he has to prepare for. "I'll be right there."
He almost feels her sigh, rather than just hearing it.
"Sure, Dick," she says, and she pulls the blanket over her head.
He doesn't remember the last time he heard his name.
.
All is well, in the same exact writing, the same loops for l's, the same faint scent of the sea. Nightwing is starting to think Kaldur has a whole stash of tiny slips of paper bearing the same, stupid message.
He sets it on fire and watches as it burns.
.
Mal slams a hand down on Nightwing's desk and he starts despite himself.
"Time for a drink," Mal says firmly. "Come on, get up."
"I've gotta be at the Watchtower in half an hour," Nightwing protests.
"They can live without you for a few hours. Let's go, I need to get plastered tonight."
"I can't—"
"Oh, yes, you can."
"No, I'm real busy, Mal, I'll take a rain check."
"I don't see any rain. Do you see any rain? No rain checks, dammit, now let's go."
"Mal!" he shouts, and Mal leans back, raising an eyebrow. "I said I can't. Let it go."
Mal doesn't say anything and Nightwing tries to get back to his reading but he can't.
"I'm sorry," he mutters, but Mal is already on his way to the zeta tubes, somehow managing to look small.
.
All is well. He doesn't burn it, doesn't even really read it, feels the words on the paper without even having to open it, thinks about how wrong it is that he's waiting for something to be unwell one day.
He leaves the paper on his desk and hopes someone will see it and he won't have to carry this weight on his shoulders alone anymore. He makes it outside of the warehouse before he doubles back in and burns it.
.
Conner comes to sit beside him on the ground in the training room as Gar and Le'gaan spar. Nightwing looks at the clone and sees that he's the same, exactly the same, as before, as ever, as always.
"You know, a lot of people would do a lot of things to be frozen at one age," he says, and he has no idea why.
Conner doesn't even look at him. "Would you?"
He quickly gets up to point out a flaw on Le'gaan's footing.
.
All is well.
No, it isn't.
.
Palo Alto is nice in the spring, but deserted, all students gone for the break, and Nightwing doesn't have to look hard before he's found Wally, sitting on his porch with a dog, one hand in a bag of chips, the other balancing a textbook on his lap, sunlight catching in the red of his hair and making it look like it's on fire. He thinks about calling out, expects a punch or two or some shouting maybe, but in the end he settles on the rooftop across from Wally and Artemis's home and watches his best friend until the sun starts to go down and Wally goes back inside, and Nightwing starts to understand why Peter Pan didn't want to grow up.
.
All is well.
He swallows the paper this time. It tastes like ink. He doesn't know what he was expecting but it wasn't that.
.
Wayne Manor is big, but without Bruce, it's empty, too. Nightwing wanders through the halls, the tips of his fingers trailing over the walls, and his feet lead him into his old room. It feels cramped, four tiny walls such a stark difference from the wide expanse of his safehouse in Blüdhaven. He remembers, as vaguely as though from a dream, how awed he was in seeing his room when he first came to Wayne Manor. He doesn't feel any of that.
He stays the night anyway and in the morning, his entire body is sore from folding himself onto a bed that's way too small for him now.
.
All is well.
But how can he know, really know, what well is, when all he can think about is the danger he has allowed them sink into?
.
Jason's hologram stares blankly ahead. Nightwing sits before it and wishes they had programmed it to show him without his mask. In full uniform, it looks more like a memorial for Robin, before the red was switched for black and blue.
.
All is well.
Wally picks up this time and they listen to each other breathing for an entire minute.
"Why don't they ever say anything else?" Wally bursts out.
Nightwing starts to laugh but it dies before it comes out and he shrugs before remembering that Wally can't see him. "Yeah. I know."
Wally sighs. "What about you, is the all well with you?"
Nightwing sweeps the ashes of the note into the wastebasket under his desk and wipes the soot off his hand and onto his suit. "I'm fine," he says automatically.
"You don't sound fine."
"Big deal to you, is it?" he asks before he can stop himself.
More silence. Wally's eating, chewing on something crunchy. Nightwing feels homesick, but he doesn't know why. He's home right now.
"Okay, dude," Wally says. "Catch you later."
Nightwing hangs up before Wally does and then calls him right back.
"I probably hate this more than you do," he says.
Wally laughs. "I don't know, Dick. That'd be a shit ton of hatred, don't know if your little body is capable of it."
"It is." There are black stains on his desk from the ashes of all the little notes, stuck in the whorls in the wood, and they will never come out. One day, he'll throw out this desk and it will be broken up and made into smaller things and the ashes will still be there and no one will even know. Someone might touch the black sunk into the wood and wonder, how did this happen?
How did this happen? When did they grow up?
"Where are you?" Wally asks.
"Blüdhaven."
"Alright, stay there. I'm coming to discuss severe matters of hatred. It's important."
"I'm sorry," spills past his lips. "I'm sorry, Wally. It's all just..." he trails, and Wally says, "Yeah," and they listen to more breathing, and there's a bark on Wally's end that he silences with a delicate, "Shhh."
"I'm on my way," Wally says, and he hangs up.
Nightwing tries to clean the ashes off his desk until Wally comes. He gets most of it out.
The rest, he decides to just leave.
.